


Radio Summerhall

by Vana



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, anyway here's summerhall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-03
Updated: 2016-10-03
Packaged: 2018-08-19 05:51:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8192609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vana/pseuds/Vana
Summary: Of all the doomed places in the world, there was one right in your path. Anyway, here’s Summerhall.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [crossingwinter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/gifts).



Great disasters often become monuments: See who died here, see how they tried to survive — the great earthquake, the volcanic eruption, the flood. Watch the shaky and dated filmstrip, place your fingertips on the sugar-smeared interactive exhibits and play with the lives of the dead. Trace their demise while you’re thinking what you’ll get for lunch. Look, they ran this way and that — frightened rats in the maze, rabbits in the poison gas warren, men and women and children on a starved stampede like wild animals! Crazed and cannibalistic! See how they try to outrun their fate!

See how they failed.

Wonder idly if the next Doom hits, what will you do? Will you be the one to keep your head, to lead your people out of the fire? What glory will be yours? Filing out of the cool underground museums, starting your car in the parking lot, kids watching their iPads in the carseats in the back — you almost wish it could happen, just to see what you’re made of.

—

Some disasters don’t make good PR. Burnt-out shells of buildings in the Old Country, shattered by airborne bombs decades ago — they look good in black-and-white postcards, but when you’re there, you spend ten minutes picking your way through the dust solemnly, one minute twenty seconds shaking your head at the cruelty of War, two to three minutes looking at your family members while you all say, “Well?” and “Yes, looks like that’s about it,” and “Should we go find that pizzeria?”

But those places are lucky. At least you can find those places in the average guidebook. You can drop a few bills into the cloudy plastic bin that says “Support Our Memorial Site” and you can sign the musty guestbook with your name, your family’s names and your towns. You can let your kid take the pen and write their name in their acute-angled, shaky capital letters. Later, more mature visitors will come and wonder why the adults let their children deface the record that way. In the homes above their heads, where the bomb victims lived, a child used to practice writing on the wall with a pencil — spiky, irregular, wriggling hand all kinetic and potential energy. Museums would pay big for those children’s scribbles now. Just before the destruction came, the mother had sighed, considered cleaning it up, turned away instead to stir the dinner peas, and died.

—

There are tragedies that are even unluckier than that. No one steps foot on those sites unless they’re lost, GPS sending them hopelessly awry in the Wifi-poor industrial belt or in the electrical insanity of a Southern rainstorm. You’re driving and driving and peering at the dashboard unit and saying to yourself, _Seems like I should have gotten there by now._ But you’ve never been there — your cousin’s new town, the out-of-the-way country manor of the wedding reception, the textiles museum you told yourself you’d visit before you ditched your knitting hobby completely. Today is the day, you said, and you got in your car and went — but now you’re maybe a little lost. And you stop for gas in a small town. There’s only low-grade so you only get a little and you’ll top it off with premium later… and you buy a Coke and the guy is in overalls and talks with a country twang… and you don’t really want to ask him about the yarn place. You drive on.

Outside town, there’s a water tower, and then a road sign. Amberly, where the museum is, 12 miles: oh thank god. And then _Summerhall, 8 miles_. What the hell is Summerhall? That wasn’t on the map. You drive through on your way to Amberly, wondering if the knitting bug will come back once you’ve seen the exhibits.

And what you see in Summerhall, just passing through, is one of those unlucky disasters. Less a shell and more a still-smoking husk, less a monument and more a weeping ruin. No one has been there in years. The cement steams gray, the fallen autumn leaves littering the ground are somehow fossilized, the burnt edges of trash blow along the sides of the road. Whatever was playing on the AM radio fades to static. The cries of the dead hang in the air.

—

There’s no collection box at Summerhall. No footpaths are maintained, no handicap access, no brochure, no video. There’s some local mythos, but it takes a lot of digging to get to it. Someone wrote up a report, but it’s a mess, a historian’s nightmare: ink everywhere, that brittle, tissuey typewriter paper from practically last century falling apart with just a breath.

_The flames were out of control… burned so hot that …_

At first, it seems like your average catastrophic fire. Just a prairie fire gone wrong: the thought is comforting. It happens all the time. Sad, of course. It was a poor town maybe, and no one bothered to clean it up — just left.

But the prairie fire theory starts to fall apart the deeper you go.

_Pyromancers … though the septon has warned that …_

Maybe some kind of cult, you think. Pyromancers sounds like a cult or else some kind of metal band. You shake your head. Terrible stuff, what religious fanatics can do with enough power and not enough mental health care.

And then even that dries up, like the leaves, the smoldering coupon edges, the canceled junk mail. There’s more:

_...the blood of the dragon gathered in one … seven eggs to honor the seven gods …_

You blink and grow pale, a little greener than the fluorescents in the basement of the Amberly library, ashier than the old man you spoke to when you made that casual conversation about Summerhall in the first place.

_Just what the hell happened here?_

—

Rhaegar happened, for one.

Baby naming trends come and go like prairie fires in small towns. One neighborhood will have a lot of -sha and -la names one year and all the -den and -lee names the next. In some small towns, you can tell within six months how old someone is by the name their parents saddled them with.

In Summerhall, the idea seemed to be to pack as many names full of “ae” as possible. Baby Rhaegar was born to Rhaella and Aerys. Rhaella was born to Jaehaerys and Shaera. Jaeherys’ dad was Aegon. You get the idea. Honestly it looks a little weird, somewhere between Eurotrash and just trashy, but … well, small towns.

From all evidence, it looks like baby Rhaegar, whatever happened to him later in his life, was born the night of the fire. It looks, even more unbelievably, like his great-grandfather actually _set_ the fire. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe it was arson, some kind of insurance fraud, that’s not unheard of, especially if the family were poor and expecting a baby and desperate.

After that, things get really dicey.

In the years after Summerhall, no one would talk about it in the way that no one talked about crazy Aunt Jenny ranting in the attic or poor, poor sister Jeyne who had to get sent away to the asylum. They’ll call it mental illness now, and they’ll make crowdfunding campaigns and ribbons to stick on your car for awareness. But then, it was just “they gone clean crazy.”

And Great-Granddad Aegon, it seemed, had gone sparkling, spear-sharp, clean crazy.

“Well, he wanted dragons,” said the old man you talked to before he clammed up, froze you out for awhile. Straight-faced as you please, _he wanted dragons_ , just like you might say _he wanted a new Buick_. Only it was dragons. Of course.

—

So Great-Granddad Aegon wanted dragons and he decided, by God and Mom and everyone, he was going to hatch some dragons. On the night of his great-grandson’s birth. In the same house? What could possibly go wrong?

Everything, it seemed.

No, really. 

_Everything._

Dad went crazy afterwards. Wouldn’t you? Your grandfather gets a bunch of hedge warlocks together to do a magic circle like it’s _Harry Potter_ or something. He gets some “dragon eggs” that were probably made by pre-pubescent girls little better than slaves in the East out of some kind of poly-plastic hybrid that’s going to offgas like a motherfucker _even if you don’t set it on fire._

Rhaella is not in great shape anyway and the baby is coming any time and no one could tell whether the contractions were Braxton-Hicks or real.

The town simmered in the late-summer heat. Trees and fields were dry, sere as the desert that year, there hadn’t been enough rain, even in the Reach. The wines of the year always tasted bitter and papery, the reds all tannin and silt, the whites vinegar and stems. Someone should have just poured them all out and started over.

The drought had turned the Red Forest into kindling.

Rhaella went into labor, for real. The doctors, those who weren’t too busy with _dragons_ and all, attended her with grim faces and minds elsewhere. The women held her knees up while she pushed, pushed, bit her lips to draw the blood, but the baby bided his time. The head was there, almost out, almost breaching her, but he waited. And the nursemaids waited. And Rhaella, twisted in pain but stoic as a stone figure, waited.

It was if, she said later, the baby was listening.

Gather the magicians, draw the chalk circle. Decant the sacred oils of Asshai and Lys and Yi Ti. Prepare the green flame, and set the fake dragon eggs on fire, Grandpa. Of course. Why not. After all, you might get seven dragons out of it.

What could _possibly_ go wrong?

—

Summerhall burned. From the top of the sky to the mole holes far underground, the oil-fueled green-gold fire burned down the life of the town. Buildings where people had made love, grown old, watched their children practice their writing with sticks on the dusty floors — gone in minutes. Backyard gardens where the tendrils of sweet snap peas had clung stubbornly through the dry season to their thready trellises were reduced to nothing at all but bits of string that curled black in the ruins. Rocking chairs and day planners, overalls and dial phones — everything that made up a life — glowed greenly for moments, popped in a gruesome parody, and withered into dust in the road.

In the Red Forest, the trees awoke. The bark steamed like a firecracker just before it exploded. The branches cracked all at once into searing flame. And the leaves fell half-dead, half-alive, curling horrified dry and shocked, and if leaves could scream they would have — some say they did.

A day later it was over. The dead were uncounted, the living fled, never to return. Rhaella made it out alive, and so did baby Rhaegar, who crowned and slid out wailing while the streets smoked black and the sun sank red below the horizon. The man who got them out to safety is said in the stories to be almost seven feet tall. Heroes always do grow taller in folklore. Mostly they die, too. This one did: Duncan the Tall, they called him — the hero who died in Summerhall to save dozens of lives.

Aerys lived, too, though people say he left his mind behind in the wreckage of the fire. After Summerhall, he became one of the crazy uncle types you try to leave in the attic and not talk about, except he wouldn’t stay in the attic. It was inconvenient, to say the least. Eventually someone did him in. Rhaella and Rhaegar passed, too. The whole line was seemingly dead except for a sister, or maybe a niece, somewhere off East. No one would be surprised if she didn’t want anything to do with the place.

—

A folk singer wrote about it when he read the blogs that sprang up about Summerhall after the mystery got a short-lived foothold on the Internet and in cold-case culture. He called the song “Fallen Leaves,” which is about as trite a name as you could think of, but he wasn’t really thinking of names, he said later. He was thinking about the tragedy, and who perished, and what was left. The song was so sad it made him cry to sing it sometimes.

No one he played it for really heard it, because he was not a very good musician and he was only on the county fair circuit and he only got to play at the same time as the auctions, hours before the headliners. Rarely did anyone ever even pretend to listen to “Fallen Leaves” over the fast-taking auctioneer _howdy afternoon folks, first off what we have here, some livestock, this is a nice little kind of a cow she’ll be a good milker maybe quart quart and a half a day who’ll gimme five? no one’ll gimme five for this little cow? gentlemen in the black stetson what’ll you say? ten? lady in the bonnet twelve, stetson twelve-fifiy, who’ll give fifteen? fifteen, fifteen, for the sweetest little cow in the yard today? bonnet’ll give seventeen, that’s a good gal, stetson gimme twenty, twenty, and she’s sold to the gentleman in the stetson hat for twenty, good man. she’s a good cow, she’ll treat you right, she’ll be nice to your kids, they say she comes of that good old Summerhall stock._

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you [shadowsfan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowsfan/pseuds/shadowsfan/) for your encouragement and support and to [Sir_Bedevere](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Sir_Bedevere/) and [Hedge_witch](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Hedge_witch/) for reading this before I submitted it and letting me know it was up to snuff.


End file.
